Nevada “Egg-As-Person” 2012 Ballot Initiative is Dead

The petition deadline has passed and Personhood Nevada has failed to garner the number of signatures necessary to get an amendment onto the 2012 ballot letting voters decide if they want to grant the full rights of personhood to fertilized eggs.

“We had an idea that we may not make it, based on the time we had to collect signatures,” said Anna Maria Serra-Radford, president of Personhood Nevada.

The amendment called “The Right to Live for Young and Old” sought to define life as beginning at conception. It also would have prohibited some forms of birth control, fertility treatments when selective reduction is used and embryonic stem cell research.

It said, “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. As used in this section, the word `person’ includes every human being from beginning of biological development until death.”

Personhood Nevada was only one of the groups trying to push an amendment to define life as beginning at conception, and to “protect” it from that point on. The other group, Nevada Prolife Coalition, withdrew their petitions in order to help Personhood Nevada, according to the Associated Press. Nevada Prolife Coalition is run by Chet Gallagher, one of the faces of Operation Save America and the “Abortion-Free States” project.